STANDARDS: The single most powerful tool for raising team performance
Stronger than motivation. More powerful than goals. More useful than habits. More natural than KPIs. STANDARDS are the one tool I've used to drive every major increase in sporting and work performance
To become world-class at something (ie. The top 1-3% in the world), you only need three things:
An excellent coach
A crazy work ethic
To train with people better than you
*If you want to be the top 0.01% in the world then we’d add genetic talent to this list.
And if I could only pick one of these three, it would be the third one. Standards.
At age 9, I started trampoline training with the squad of athletes 2-4 years older than me. I went from being the best athlete in my previous squad of athletes my own age, to the worst in my new squad. I was too shy to talk to the older kids, and my coach was harsh on me for not being brave enough to try scary new tricks.
At age 17, I joined the Australian Institute of Sport for trampolining. It was 5 guys, and me - the only female - in the program. But the coach gave us the exact same training program.
At age 24, after switching sports to beach volleyball just two years prior, I moved to Hermosa Beach in California for 8 months. It’s not only the birthplace of the sport, but also the city where every single top ranked player in the USA relocates to.
At age 25, I was invited to join the CrossFit Athletic team. I could squat, but on every other movement I was way out of my league. My teammates could do 50 pullups in a row, snatch 80kg above their head, and knock out sets of deficit handstand pushups.
At age 30, my beach volleyball partner and I started training almost exclusively with guys. They were taller than us, quicker in defence, and hit the ball harder.
Every time I’ve trained with people better than me - my level always improves to match theirs. My abilities increase to meet my teammates and training partners.
I rose to meet the standard.
What are standards?
Standards are the minimum acceptable level of behaviour.
A standard can be held by a single person, but almost universally standards are found within groups of people: friends, a family, a sports team, a work team, a company, or even a country.
Standards, once you have the ability to consistently meet them, are largely unconscious. We automatically adhere to them. You may not even recognise them as standards.
In sport:
Do you do extra reps before you leave training?
Is it ok to talk back to the coach?
How hard do you hustle in the last few minutes of the game when you know you’ve already won or lost?
Is it ok to skip training when you’re tired? Sick? Have something happening in your personal life?
At work:
What is the quality of work you produce?
How quickly do you get back to clients?
How late can you show up and still be on time?
Are emails and written work proofread and error free in your organisation?
What hours of the day do people need to be available to respond to work messages?
Does your team default to video on in a zoom meeting?
How close to budget does your division get each year? How close to OKRs do you get?
Who speaks first in meetings - the most junior or the most senior person?
The definition I use for standards is:
Standards = habits + emotional consequences
Habits are automatic behaviours. Brushing your teeth before bed, reading on your daily commute, going to the gym in your lunch break, grabbing a coffee with a teammate at 11am each day.
Standards go a step further because the expected behaviour is a pass-fail with emotional consequences attached.
Fail to meet the standard and we feel shame, guilt, disappointment, and inadequacy. Exceed the standard and we feel pride, competence, joy and a sense of belonging to the group.
Standards are the strongest lever for behaviour change
There are many ways we try to change behaviours. Rewards. Punishments. Goals. Habits. Systems.
Standards are more powerful than all of these for a single reason: Humans are hardwired to seek belonging.
In prehistoric times, isolation from the tribe was the surest path to an early death. Now, psychologists and neuroscientists back this up with findings including:
When other people agree with us, fMRI scans show heightened activity in the brain areas related to reward. And people will change their personal preferences to agree with their peers.
When people are being observed, they are more likely to act according to social norms of fairness, rather than to maximise self-interest.
We learn by imitation, and children will over-imitate (copy action steps they know are unnecessary) simply to mimic an adult’s pattern of behaviour.
Our brains are constantly looking for ways for us to fit in. And to our brains, meeting the standard guarantees belonging.
That can lead to chilling outcomes where people alter their behaviour well beyond their moral beliefs in order to fit in - like Milgram’s prison experiment and the persecution of Jews under Hitler. But a desire to belong can also lead us to copy the positive behaviour of our peers such as eating healthier, voting, donating to charity, producing high quality work and keeping up with an elder sibling (fun fact: it turns out younger siblings are more likely to become elite athletes as they spend their childhood trying to meet the higher standards of their elder siblings).
As a 9 year old athlete, that desire to meet the standards of my new squad led to 12 national title wins in a row. As a 24 year old, moving to California led to winning an event on the USA national tour. As a CrossFit athlete, training in a team that was far better than me led to learning to lift 100kg above my head.
We want to fit in. We want to keep up. We want to belong.
We are hardwired to want to meet standards.
Standards in teams - the lowest common denominator
I once worked with a guy called Sam.
Sam talked a big game. He had a resume with a number of great logos on it. He was well-liked and popular at Friday night drinks.
But Sam didn’t do any work. He’d call meetings. He’d talk a lot about projects. He was friends with several leaders and so would often get the chance to present (other people’s work) in high level meetings. He went for lots of coffee meetings with other departments. He used words like ‘synergies’ and ‘efficiencies’. And he was great at managing up.
Sam’s manager never called him out.
And gradually, all of Sam’s teammates started… slowing down. Apparently it didn’t matter if a deadline was missed, so why stay late to finish a project? Apparently there were no consequences to doing sub-par work, so why stress about quality. Apparently, building relationships and politicking was valued more than meeting OKRs, so people started spending their time on that instead.
‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. That goes for all of us, but especially those, who by their rank, have a leadership role.’ ~ Chief of the Army, Lieutenant-General David Morrison
Remember standards are the minimum acceptable level of behaviour. Let someone repeatedly slip below the standard without calling it out, and you’ve just set a new standard.
Teams always trend towards the lowest acceptable standard. Always.
Level setting your current standard
In my first ever National level event for beach volleyball, my partner and I played against the top ranked Australian team - between them they had 8 Olympic attendances.
It was the biggest game of our careers. We threw every tactic, every bit of energy, ever bit of focus into the game.
And we were utterly annihilated.
In a game to 21, we didn’t get past 7 points.
‘They could have taken it easier on you,’ I remember friends saying after they witnessed our humiliation.
But I’m glad they didn’t. That day, it was very clear what the standard was to play in the Australian team. And it was very clear how far from meeting the standard we were.
In sport, standards are objective. But at work, most people hesitate to tell you when you are not meeting the standard. We shy away from the truth to be ‘nice’ and to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
It’s even rarer to admit to yourself that your standards are too low. That takes humility and honesty. Even then, because standards are social - our performance is defined relative to what others are doing - we often need someone to hold up a mirror to show us what excellence looks like.
Wes Kao wrote a brilliant post on standards which includes some of the excuses we use to justify work that doesn’t meet a standard of excellence:
‘It’s good enough.’
‘There’s a trade-off between speed and quality.'
‘It’s optimising past the point of diminishing returns.’
‘It’s too much work’
‘Done is better than perfect.’
‘It’s not worth the ROI to make it better.’
‘Quality is hard to define and varies by function, project, etc.’
Before you try to raise your standards, you have to honestly acknowledge where you are now. Have you been telling yourself or your team that you’re doing a good job, or using any of these excuses to justify your work, when in reality you are getting thumped 21-7 by Olympians?
Examples of world-class work are all around us if we go looking. Hold up the mirror and be truthful.
It took me 6 years, over 2000 training sessions, and the equivalent of a house deposit paid to my coach in lessons but eventually I stood beside one of those players who had beaten me so badly. Not as an opponent, but as a teammate. I met the standard.
(And now I take every opportunity to beat up and coming young players 21-7 as well 😁)
Setting a new team standard
Framing the conversation
Opening your Monday morning team meeting with ‘you all suck, we need to raise our standards’ isn’t going to land well. To lead a conversation about raising standards, three framings are important:
Our team is good, but we want to be better
When we get a great performance review, we are inspired to do even better. There is nothing more motivating than progress. Start from good, build to great, then excellent, then world-class. Even the world’s best athletes don’t stop trying to raise their standards.
All in together
The team agrees what the new standard of excellence is together. The leader might share examples of what world class looks like, but the decision is a collective one.
Support to reach the standard
The focus is on coaching - from the leader and from your peers - to reach the new standard. We are not out to punish each other for not being good enough, we commit to supporting each other to grow.
How high is too high?
Standards are the minimum level of performance. So they have to be reachable. We aren’t setting aspirational goals. We aren’t setting OKRs where we only expect to make it 70% of the way. A standard is an expectation that you will always reach that level.
For most people, 3 months is about the limit of time they can feel like they are underperforming and continue to sustain effort towards meeting the standard. Don’t set a standard that can’t be reached within that time.
How often can you raise the standard?
There is no definitive answer, but in high performing teams approximately every 6 months keeps motivation high. Teams experience rapid improvement over time, but there is also enough time to adjust to new standards and have the chance to feel the pride of outperforming them (there’s nothing worse than always feeling like you are failing the standard).
Team output versus individual strengths?
One objection to setting standards is that team members feel everyone is pushed to be the same and there is no room for individual differences. I had a role where our team was given 22 performance standards. We were told ‘there’s still room for you to have individual strengths over and above meeting all of those standards’ 🙄
The best teams set standards at the team level, and then collaborate to achieve them. In football, not everyone is expected to be able to run the distance a mid-fielder does AND have the reaction times of a goal keeper. You might have someone that is a gun at finding insights in data, whereas you excel at communicating - together you create an excellent presentation that meets the standard.
Strategies to raise performance to meet the standard
1) Immersion
Training with the older squad of kids, or training with the men, accelerated my sporting performance - I had to get better to meet the standard.
Immersion works best for raising an individual’s standards (it’s harder, although possible, to immerse a whole team).
Can you join a team that is better than you? Can you shadow an expert and immerse yourself in their work? Can you move to a company that has higher standards?
2) One team member sets the bar
When I left university I thought I knew how to use Excel. On day 1 of my first professional role, I sat next to Ryan who proceeded to manipulate 60k rows of data, without touching the mouse, at the speed of a champion touch-typer. It took me less than ten seconds to realise I was out of my depth.
Ryan was so good he eventually went on to start his own Excel modelling consulting company. But in our team, he set the bar for excellence, and he coached all of us on how to meet it.
3) Progressive overload
If the new standard relates to capacity of output (rather than quality), then overloading your team temporarily helps build capacity. Like an athlete who lifts heavier than normal, then rests, and comes back able to handle those heavier weights comfortably. I wrote more about capacity building here.
Can your sales team temporarily double their outbound calls? Can your engineering team run a sprint cycle in a week instead of two? Make it clear that won’t be the standard forever, but pushing to that level temporarily forces your team to create new systems, new ways of working, and better focus.
4) Coaching
Feedback falls into three categories:
Evaluative - did you meet the standard or not. How far off were you?
Coaching - here is exactly what you need to do to improve
Appreciation - I recognise the effort you are making
I had a manager tell me that a piece of writing I had done for our fund LPs about a new investment was a 5 out of 10 (evaluative). She then explained that the piece needed to evoke a sense of ‘luckiness’ that we had been able to get in on the deal, as well as stronger rationale about why we believe this company will win the market (coaching). When I rewrote the piece, she thanked me for my willingness to take on feedback (appreciation).
Whether you are a manager or a peer, coaching individuals in your team takes a huge amount of time upfront. But that time is an investment you should only have to make once.
If you don’t have a high coaching culture, soon enough people will start to ignore high standards because they don’t know how to reach them.
Hiring for standards
1) Be explicit about your standards
The people that already work at the level of your standards will want to work for your company. Instead of writing job ads that mimic every other job ad - ‘we’re a dynamic and fast paced environment’ - be explicit.
For example:
‘One of our values is Olympian Work Ethic… We are all committed to at least 12 hour days Monday through Thursday. Friday we do tend to work late and then people go out. It’s an in-office culture. Just like you technically could technically become an amazing baseball player by hitting balls in the batting cage alone, but the real magic happens when you’re practising with your other teammates to prepare for the big game.’ ~ Mike Shebat, Traba founder and CEO
‘One of our core founding values is openness and transparency… One of the failure modes that I think many companies find themselves in with recruiting is that it is fundamentally a matching problem, not a sales problem. And so I share a lot of information during the interview process of all of the reasons why you probably won’t want to work here. And some people are super energised by those. I had an interview very recently where I talked about how all of our one-on-ones are recorded and shared. In fact, this conversation that we’re having now is recorded and will be shared with our whole company. And the response was, “Okay, can we delete this recording? And I don’t want to be part of this anymore.” It’s like, great, we’ve now ended the process.’ ~ Sam Corcos, Levels founder and CEO
2) Hiring managers need humility
A-grade managers hire people they think are better than them. B grade managers hire people they know are worse than them, which keeps their job and their ego safe (in the short term at least).
Ask the hiring manager questions like this when it comes to new hires:
If this person was your boss, would you be excited to work for them?
If you could only hire one person this year, would you fight for this person?
Will this new hire make us raise our standards, help us maintain our standards, or is there risk they’ll lower our standards?
3) Use standard holders
Hiring managers are always between a rock and a hard place - they are only hiring because there is a gap in the team and they needed someone to fill it yesterday. The rest of the team and the manager are covering that gap.
Hiring is also time consuming, expensive and it’s difficult to find the right person. And that load is added on top of the manager’s already overflowing schedule.
All of the temptation is to just hire someone good enough.
You can reduce this temptation by using ‘standard holders’. This means that other people in the organisation without these pressures - the founder, peer level managers, a 2IC - have the final say on whether a new hire will help raise the standards… or not.
4) Correct hiring mistakes quickly
In any organisation there are:
Behavioural standards (how we treat people, what time you show up etc)
Quality standards (how good is your work)
Capacity standards (how quickly do you work, how much do you produce)
You’ll know if someone meets the behavioural standards within a few weeks. You’ll know if they meet (or are obviously on track to meet) the quality and capacity standards within a couple of months.
You have a probation period for a reason. Use it.
It’s not an easy conversation, but if you’ve been explicit about standards from the first interview, then it shouldn’t be a surprise. No one ever says ‘I wish I’d kept that person in the team for longer’ when they aren’t meeting the standard.
Holding the line
Once people are able to reach the standard, how do you hold the line so that people don’t slip below it if they get busy, tired, or complacent? If you read nothing else in this post, read this. It’s important because it needs to happen day after day, hour after hour, moment after moment. You must hold the line.
1) Manufacture emotional consequences
Standards = habits + emotional consequences
Once a standard is deeply embedded in a team, individuals feel emotional consequences when they know they haven’t met the standard (think of the sinking feeling in your stomach when you catch an error in your work after sharing it with a client).
But in the early days of establishing a standard, you can use an external lever to add consequences.
When I coach sport, I have a rule: for every minute you are late, you have to do 5 pushups before you can join the class. Most classes, someone would show up a minute or two late. The class tends to take great delight in making that person complete five or ten pushups.
One day a teenager showed up 52 minutes late to a two hour class.
‘My teacher held me late at school, and then I missed the bus…’ she started to tell me.
Meanwhile I had my calculator out.
‘That’ll be 260 pushups before you can join the class,’ I said.
‘What? But it wasn’t my fault.’
‘Better get started.’
It took her the entire class to finish the pushups.
Guess how often she was later after that?
Similar examples of external levers to hold the line include:
To uphold the standard that a founder’s time is more valuable than an investor’s, A16Z famously fines employees $10 for every minute they are late to founder meetings
To reinforce the standard of respecting people’s personal time, at Blackbird if you send a Slack message after 7pm you get called out with the ‘blood’ emoji
To make sure all voices are heard in meetings, the meeting chair always calls on the most junior person to speak first. If a more senior person tries to jump in the meeting chair can mute them midsentence.
To ensure people keep swinging for the fences with their ideas, Google’s Moonshot X division celebrates at all-hands meetings when teams shut down projects that aren’t working, and even pays team members a small bonus for doing so.
2) No stories, only standards
Imagine a typical SaaS company. To stay on the growth path for their next venture funding round, they have a need to grow 20% each month. Most leaders talk about that 20% as a goal - something to aspire to - when it actually needs to be a standard - the minimum level of performance.
In this company, what happens when February comes in at 15% growth?
Most teams tell themselves a story. That one customer didn’t come through. Some renewals spilled over into next month. Markets are soft. One of the key team members was on holidays This time of year is always quiet.
And because it is a small team, and the founder is empathetic, she is understanding.
In companies with standards, 15% is a failure. The reasons don’t matter. The team take full accountability.
High performers don’t have stories, only standards.
‘When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable - if there are no consequences - that poor performance becomes the new standard. Therefore, leaders must enforce standards.’ ~Jocko Willink
Some people think ignoring stories makes them an asshole. But remember Sam? When you let stories take precedence over standards, you are setting a new (lower) standard.
As Kim Scott says in Radical Candor, it is possible to ‘care personally, and challenge directly’.
3) Empower your team to own the standard
‘While the country is still watching replays and schoolkids lie in bed dreaming of All Blacks glory, the All Blacks are tidying up after themselves. Sweeping the sheds. Doing it properly… Character begins with humility.’ ~ James Kerr
The All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, are one of the greatest sporting teams on the planet. They hold a 76% winning record, have won three World Cups, and since the introduction of world rankings have held the number one spot longer than all other teams put together.
However, back in 2004 things were totally different. The All Blacks had just been demolished by South Africa, 40-26. And, as was typical for the players, they started drinking. And drinking. It got so bad, even their competition felt sorry for them. South African players staying in the same hotel had to rescue All Black players from bushes, and from gutters, and put them in the recovery position.
So how did they go from passed out in the gutter, to the best sports team on the planet?
The coaches empowered the team to define the standard, and then to hold the line.
They raised their standards - from focusing on a single game - to leaving a legacy. ‘Leave the jersey in a better place’ became their mantra. Each new member of the team was presented their numbered jersey by the player that held that number in the past. The expectation is to become the best player to ever wear that number, until you pass it on.
They asked the players to hold the standard. The head coach Graham Henry said they gave key senior players a ‘portfolio of responsibilities from on-field leadership to social organisation, new player mentoring to community relations. The players induct young players, tell them what the expectations are. It’s better coming from their peers.’
They selected for standards, focusing on choosing players with character, even over talent, with a policy called ‘no dickheads’. Some of New Zealand’s best players never made it into the All Blacks team.
One year after players were fished out of the gutters, they again stood across the field from South Africa. Black and silver, versus green and gold. The All Blacks, versus the Springboks. South Africa were undefeated in the season so far.
But this time the All Blacks came with new standards. With a new culture. With a new Haka.
This time they demolished South Africa.
And after the game, the same as every game, two of the most senior players picked up long handled brooms and swept the locker room.
Hold the line.
Summary
What are standards?
The minimum acceptable level of performance
Standards = habits + emotional consequences
Standards are the strongest level for behaviour change
Neuroscience and psychology show us that humans are hardwired to want to belong
Standards in teams - the lowest common denominator
Teams devolve to the lowest acceptable standard
The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept. As a leader, if you ignore work or behaviour that doesn’t meet the standard, and you’ve just set a new (lower) standard
Level setting your current standard
Standards are social - our performance is defined relative to what others are doing
People are too ‘nice’ to tell you the truth when you aren’t meeting the standard
It’s even rarer to admit to yourself that your standards are too low
Setting a new team standard
Frame the conversation with:
Our team is good, but we want to be better
All in together - the collective decides the new standard
Focus on coaching
You can raise standards every 6 months. Teams need 3 months to adjust to a new standard, and 3 months to feel the pride of outperforming that standard
Allow space for individual strengths by using team standards
Strategies to raise performance to meet the standard
Immersion - for raising an individual’s performance
One team member sets the bar
Progressive overload (for capacity standards)
Coaching - build a high feedback culture
Hiring for standards
Be explicit about your standards
Hiring manager need humility
Use standard holders
Correct mistakes quickly
Holding the line
Manufacture emotional consequences
No stories, only standards
Empower your team to own the standard
Resources mentioned in this post and additional reading:
Final thoughts
Standards are the single best tool for raising performance. Standards are stronger than motivation. More powerful than goals. More useful than habits. More natural than KPIs.
Surround yourself with high standards and you can’t help but rise to meet them.
‘Excellence can become your default’ ~ Wes Keo
We’ve focused on standards as a tool for performance. But my final thought is I also love standards for belonging. I want to spend my days with people who care deeply about the same standards I do. I love having peers that push each other to improve. The brightest days are when my teammates and I rise higher than our standards.
‘Belonging is being somewhere where you want to be, and they want you.’ ~ Brene Brown